Anyone remember old bbs systems before true isp's

Lot of free shareware.

 

Yeah, my area had a few. We had two really great ones. I was always addicted to the DOOR games, BRE, Trade Wars 2002, Yankee Trader, Legend of the Red Dragon, etc. I was close friends with one of the Sysops of one of the BBS's in my area, a lot of work went into maintaining his service. I would download shareware constantly, all kinds of Apogee and Epic games, on a 2600 baud modem no less, then later remembering how fast 14.4 seemed

They all went extinct in my area around 1994, by that time I was already on the net and everything, and I guess the local guys just didn't see the point in keeping their boards up and running. I have logged on to some other BBS's around the States thanks to telnet.

 

or win 16 color was cool or getting old pentium and quad speed to play a wc3.

 

Unfortunately, I lived in a tiny town where most people had no computers to begin with, much less ones with modems, and calling outside the city limits was long distance. So, no BBS for me. I remember how cool I thought my 40MHz 386DX with 4MB of RAM and a 200MB hard drive was at the time. And the video card could display 2^15 colors!

It's funny that we've come to a point where people can wax nostalgic about the early days of the PC and pre-mainstream Internet and its predecessors.

 

Yes, absolutely. I was an avid Wing Commander fan from the beginning, I remember upgrading my old computers just to play them. That and playing X-Wing, and at first I had to run the game on the lowest possible textures - so basically all the ships and freighters just barely resembled what they were supposed to, but then as I upgraded I could use more textures and such.

 

Someone managed to make a opensource privateer remake with extra campaigns privateer parellel you can find it on the vega strike page. Also has new ships from other series.

 

In addition to a few bbs accounts with fidomail, I also had accounts on Compuserve, Delphi, and Genie before any of them had internet gateways or disspeared in some cases.

I still have my 300 baud modem around here someplace...

AG, missing gopher to get song lyrics from boombox.umn.edu

 

The more life changes, the more it stays the same.

 

Yes, but downloading a 16k game at 300baud was not fun.

Not even at 1200baud. 2400 became a bit bearable.

Wardialers found a lot of interesting local business numbers (banks, govt, and stuff I didn't even WANT to call back), too.....

 

Man, I haven't thought of Gopher and Veronica is ages.

I was into Trade Wars as well. The first time I played Leisure Suit Larry and Police Quest was with DLed copies of the game. And we'd download really pixelated, low colour porn that would still take 15 minutes a piece.

It's crazy to think that the computer I'm sitting at now has ten times more storage capacity on it's motherboard than my old IBM OS2 had. Never mind the old Commodores, Amigas and TI and Apple IIs with kbs of memory that relied on 5" floppies and tape drives for everything.

My friend recently got a machine with 2-500GB hard disks. Anyone know about what point in time 1TB of storage would have been the sum total of all the hard disks and magnetic computer tapes in the USA or the world? Sometime in the 50s? 60s?

 

I used Compuserve and Delphi too. I also used Prodigy back in the early '90s, which is where I first got hooked on message boards - that was basically the only really great thing I can remember about P* back then, that and I loved playing Mad Maze.

I loved the Leisure Suit Larry series, I played them all up until I guess what was the 5th game (from what I remember there was no Leisure Suit Larry 4, which became a running gag.)

I always loved the BBS's that were running via Wildcat, for some reason I never cared much for the others, although I cut my teeth on the PBBS style first. I never cared much for the WWIV style. There was one Excalibur style BBS in my area which was very interesting in terms of graphics and layout, but it didn't seem to last very long. Anyone remember Ripterm?

After reading some of this I am starting to miss some of that old ANSI artwork.

 

Ah yes, I remember the old BBS's. Particularly the FOREM-based ones. (Friends Of Rick E. Moose, for those wondering). Broken Board, Rivendell, Galifrey...Ah, those were the days...

 

My family ran two different ones in the Minneapolis area. Our house had six lines comming in. Boy those were the days.

I still have a sweartshirt used as advertising back then.

 

In my area (Owensboro, KY) there were a a few BBS's. Pegasus, PC Universe, Ivarland, Trestle Board, and Space Link. There were a few others with varying degrees of success, but PC Universe was by far the superior one (and I'm not just saying that because I was close friends with the Sysop.) Space Link was primarily just for Space nuts, and space related imagery. PC Universe had unlimited time limits, unlimited downloads, and had the most turns on TW2002 and L.O.R.D. I think he ended up having 3 lines or something, in the early days it was almost constantly busy - so I would log on in the wee hours of the morning (2am - 4am).

I remember when the whole gateway opened up in terms of message boards and such, we could talk about any variety of subjects on any number of topics with people all over the states at a whim really. Which is probably why I fell in love with usenet newsgroups, which is bascially the only thing I used the net for, for a few years anyway.

I miss those huge scale corporation battles in TW2002, had some really intense battles going on for awhile.

 

I had the most awesome encounter with Trade Wars and a US/2 Warp BBS that no one ever believes what happened.

The corporation I belonged to and the other main corp, who was lead by Twisted Pair and his allies maily consisting of Coaxle were in the fight of our lives and to be honest we were losing. That was until... well this happend.

I logged into the BSS and i was greeted with my normal welcome saying my name, when i logged into Trade Wars I was greeted as a member of the other corporation. I was like what? So i did the only thing i could imgien doing, I set everything to be owned by this guy i was logged as, and left the corporation. I had a friend on the other corporation and the opposite side says his corporation was on the phone with him for five hours pissed at him for what he did. In the end I had to come clean about what happened and everyone was good friends after that.

 

Yeah some of the corporation wars I was in were not very pretty, in the game or outside of it. I had this one guy who somehow found my phone number, and left a message on my parents answering machine telling me to "stay out of his sector you SCUM!" my mom heard the message first and didn't know what was going on. Our two corporations were in a war for a long time with one another.

I remember his guild had built a port, they also had a planet in the same sector - we ended up destroying the port and ended up wearing down his planet defenses until we could take all the resources we wanted, that and killing the colonists. The dude about had a total meltdown after that. Which was no picnic for the corporation I was in either, we had to mount a very strong offensive, but the pay offs were worth it.

 

I got banned from a website for that once. Pretty simple concept actually. Use the BBS activity page and relate that to the Trade wars activity page. Whos doing what stands out pretty fast. The BBS has the real name information and from there you look in a phone book. What can I say, i was pissed at the time and wasnt going to sit back... about what i dont even rememeber now. Anyway, the guy told the sysop what happend and I got banned. Oh well, it was only one trade wars site of many i was handling.

God loves the bubbles. I always looked for a good bubble with at least two entry/exit points. If i could find a buble with a one way exit that was best.

 

I remember them quite well, as I was a Co-Sysop for one (called Merchants of Wonder on Galacticomm BBS software. I also got quite addicted to Trade Wars

 

Back in the '80s I used to spend time on dozens of BBSs in the St. Louis area. It seemed so incredibly high-tech at the time, and I remember people being really jealous that I had a 1200 baud modem ...